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17 December, 2010

What a Difference a Day Makes

Earlier this week I was lamenting the fact that I have had no feedback on my writing from anyone for a long time (or what felt like a long time) and no good feedback for even longer. I have a few stories in competitions out there, as well as having taken the daunting step of getting some of my novel professionally critiqued but I have had nothing but a couple of rejections from magazine editors for months. Well, it was all change on Wednesday.

First up, I recieved the report from the author who critiqued the first 12 000 words of my novel. He is a well-published author himself so he knows what to look for which was both exciting for me, and scary. After that sudden arrival of vulnerability into my inbox I had a phone call from a very nice lady, saying that I had won a short story competition. Although I have done pretty well in some competitions in the past (see my competition page), I have never been the outright winner of a short story event. More details to follow once they competition organisers have made the results public (they are probably still recovering their hearing from having me shriek at them in a most unprofessional manner)...

The day after that most intense quarter of an hour of my writing life, I found out I was a runner-up in last month's txtlit again. This is hardly life-changing, but it's still nice! So all-in-all this is a good writing week and has inspired me to do many things, not least, actually put some effort into designing this blog a bit better! I had been wondering what exactly I had managed to achieve in 2010, but now I'm being less grumpy I can see that the answer is, "quite a bit". It was just mostly the sort of achievement that is hard to appreciate at the time. It has been a year for digging foundations, not building sky-scrapers.